Shit my Mother says...

(FYI - This was originally written ~April 2nd)

Ah. Today we set sail for the Western Caribbean aboard the beautiful Crown Princess. Although there is Internet Access from the boat, I am probably writing this at least a few days before I post it. So we’re on Vacation. And that’s good. As is life, for the most part. And taking a vacation like this means leaving the kids with my parents which is good for two reasons. (1) NO KIDS! Yay! And (2) Inevitably one of my parents is going to say something that ends up being worth writing about – either my dad, who gives insight into the mind of a staunch Republican, who actually has enough money to almost making BEING a Republican a rational thing (not really, I know, but in his case, I can at least see why he IS); or my Mother who gives insight into the mind of the absolutely clueless conservative who votes Republican and buys into all the Fox-News Republican propaganda simply because she has no clue. No fucking clue at all. No ability to think, analyze, debate, learn or understand. She is the quintessential example of the kind of person who “reasons” on either of the four level or ten-point scales that I’ve written about before. I love her. I really do. And she’s watching my kids right now. But Politically? Philosophically? She’s brain-dead. So, not much of a spoiler at this point, but this week’s gem comes from my mother.

See… My father got the movie “Fair Game” from Netflix. Hey: He was curious. Now, my mother didn’t know what it about. For those of you who are also scratching your heads (and that’s forgivable – it wasn’t in theatres for very long) this is the story of the outing of CIAgent Valarie Plaime, told from the POV of Valarie Plaime (played by Naomi Watts) and her husband Joe Wilson (played by Sean Penn.) I’ll get to the movie’s strengths and weaknesses in a moment, but my mother’s reaction to that revelation, IMHO, was nothing short of priceless in revealing how conservative “think.” (I’ll just put that in quotes, but I swear it’s like I should spell it differently – ‘thynk’ maybe – because it doesn’t resemble any kind of real of rational thinking that I’ve ever come across!)

“Oh, I don’t want to watch that! It’s just going to be a bunch of Bush-bashing!”

What I unfortunately can’t convey in supplying that quote is all the dismissiveness, derision, condescension, distaste and indignation that was present in her tone. Basically? The movie sucks, because these two “traitors” want to make a point about Bush. Seriously.

And this is what I’ll never understand about conservatives. Valerie Plaime really does represent the ultimate pinnacle of IOKYAR. Apparently it’s her fault for getting outed, and his fault for… What? I don’t know? NOT finding a record or evidence of a sale of yellow-cake uranium that NEVER FUCKING HAPPENED. I suppose by that same logic it’s Albaerdai’s fault that Saddam wasn’t developing weapons of Mass Destruction. It’s really insane. Putting aside any distortions that the movie may put forth - and while it would hardly be the first time Hollywood embellished something for dramatic sake - it really wasn’t at all that far out on a limb with what we now know, and all but the dimmest among us could clearly see then, to be the FACTS. There is pretty much no denying any of the following:

1) There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq

2) There was scant EVIDENCE of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq

3) THE CIA sent Joe Wilson to follow up on a lead. (And who exactly sent him is completely irrelevant. Remember: At this time no one could know what he might have found! )

4) Joe Wilson found NO EVIDENCE of a massive sale of Uranium.

5) The Bush Administration lied about this, and about the possible used of several aluminum tubes in their case for going to war.

6) Joe Wilson called them out on their bullshit, when he realized they were lying.

7) His wife was outed in petty retaliation for this, as well as to squelch any and all other information that might have shown that the case for going to war in Iraq was based completely on bullshit.

8) Doing this was a crime. That’s a matter of fact, not opinion, BTW. For all the bullshit that followed, someone WAS convicted of this crime. Justice was never served, but there is no denying that what was done was, in fact, a crime… by definition.

9) When Joe Wilson didn’t take this nonsense lying down, the Right Wing press repeatedly slandered him and his wife, making the story about them rather than the fact that Bush was lying.

None of the above are matters of opinion. None of these points can be seriously debated. One can try argue that this was all somehow justified, due to the threat possessed by Saddam, but there’s a fundamental problem with that: What Joe Wilson, and pretty much everyone else involved in following up every one of Bush and Cheney’s bullshit leads was that Saddam didn’t pose a threat AT ALL! His infrastructure was crumbling, his economy was in shambles, he could barely muster enough spare parts to keep a few tanks running! And nothing, N-O-T-H-I-N-G, was ever presented that countered any of this! Bush and Cheney and Rice and Rumsfeld and Powell could make all the claims they wanted, but they FACT is that no one was finding ANYTHING! And the result of them vilifying anyone who dared hold a view that even slightly resembled REALITY (which, remember, has a long-established liberal bias!) our country was led down the rod of the single most disastrous piece of foreign policy in history.

Now THAT’S an opinion, I’ll grant you. But the facts simply aren’t there to debate it: There was no justification, no threat, and no reason to go to war. None. Much was lost, and the estimates of the costs of the war, both in terms of military casualties and tax-payer dollars given to us by the War’s REPUBLICAN cheer-leaders might be the single greatest example the Right has in terms of the Government underestimating something’s price tag. And can ANYONE tell me, what exactly we were supposed to GAIN from all of that? What was the BIG PLAN here? Because to me it’s like trying to figure out what the Villains original plan was in “Total Recall” – not only did the reasoning keep changing, but when you go right back to the start? There’s nothing there! It made Iran stronger, spread our troops too thin, destroyed out budget, destroyed our moral standing in the world, destroyed our credibility, hampered our military readiness - we saw that when Katrina hit, removed a SECULAR leader from power in a war against RADICAL RELIGIOUS THEOCRACY, so… WHAT THE FUCK WAS IT ALL ACTUALLY FOR?!

I’d say “blood for oil,” but I KNOW that can’t be right, because Dick Cheney said that was ABSURD, and I know Dick Cheney would NEVER LIE. (I mean… he swore an oath!) Of course, the same man, by the time the war was won and the peace was proving to be frustratingly out of reach, the new tune was “We can’t let these oil reserves fall into the hands of Al-Qaeda!”

So… yeah, it pretty much WAS, according to the guy who viciously attacked anyone ELSE who suggested it was. And, uh… IIRC, he was an oil man, right? Something to do with developing oil fields? Just sayin’.

So… consider all that for a moment. And let come back to the two people involved: Joe Wilson and Valrie Plaime. Why do Conservatives hate these people so much? Because they found out Bush was lying? OMFG! Really?! Of course… Bush gets a pass for the LIE and Wilson and Plaime are “traitors” because, this was such good foreign policy, right? I mean… it HAD to be! Because a Republican was driving it! And I’d love to take this insanity farther, but I really can’t. It’s just too absurd. What these people did, their great crime against humanity, was to FAIL TO FIND EVIDENCE THAT WASN’T FUCKING THERE.

And somehow… that makes THEM bad, rather than the guy who went to fucking WAR with a Sovereign Nation, based on the evidence that he insisted he had, but which no one could find. THAT GUY? That lying piece of shit? That war criminal? That mass fucking murderer? HE’S a fucking hero to these morons!

I’ve said it so many times, but THIS is why I’m liberal. It has nothing to do with any particular positions, but rather HOW THEY THINK. (Or THYNK, in the case of Conservatives.)

Liberals evaluate the evidence and then form a position based on it.


Conservatives form a position and then evaluate the evidence based on it.

Don’t get me wrong, I can understand why it bothers Conservatives that their leaders were exposed as liars, but… Fuck, you’d think they could muster at least SOME anger at those leaders for having LIED in the first place. Oh yeah, and then acted like petulant, spoiled children when someone revealed just ho full of shit they were. I’ll just never understand what anyone can see in a leader like that.

I’ll just never see it.

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There is something else that this example reminds me of, and it really blows a gaping hole in the walls of the whole “both sides do it” argument. The idea that we all do the same thing, just with our own issues and people. It reminded me of a segment of the Rush Limbaugh program that I had heard many, many years ago, during the early days of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. (No, while I was more Conservative then, I was not a fan. My father however was and remains one to this day. I heard this segment while driving in the car with him.)

The Great Gastropod was calling, “hypocrisy” on the feminists, and the liberals, who were “throwing Paula Jones under the bus” simply because her story was going against Bill Clinton. (You know: Our ‘enlightened leader’ at the time.) The thing is? Did he play a single clip to back this up? (Are you kidding?) No, of course not. And I don’t know about YOU, but I don’t seem to remember a whole lot of liberals, or indeed ANY prominent Liberals or Feminists attacking Jones at the time. I guess not sharing his rabid, mouth-foaming irrational hatred of Bill Clinton was the same as “attacking Paula Jones” in his mynd, but in that Liberal paradise that the rest of us call REALITY, it simply ISN’T. What’s more, I don’t really think Bill Clinton was anyone’s great hero to begin with. Not LIBERALS anyway! Party DEMOCRATS maybe, but that’s not the same thing. And when you think about it, Obama pissed away his historic opportunity using pretty much the same tactics that Bill Clinton did: Move to the center, even the center-right and hope the hard-right plays fair. And the results were the same! Republicans took back the House within 2 years. They didn’t get the senate this time around, but when you look at the political landscape now, it hardly matters! So Clinton was not a ‘hero’ in the mold of a Roosevelt or a Kennedy (or in the mold of Reagan or Bush to the Right.) And Paula Jones was no villain. It’s a patently absurd suggestion! And REALLY neither was Linda Tripp.

Who were the villains, then?

The same people they always are: The Congressional Republicans who only seem to care about Sexual Harrassment, Adultery or Women’s Equality when it helps them impeach a Democrat that they can’t find any legitimate reason too. Jones was never the bad buy in our eyes. And while we made fun of her, and had little syp,mathy for the simultaneous fame, notoriety and isolation that she brought upon herself, neither was Tripp. And neither was Lewinsky, for that matter. The villain? They person we hated for all the bullshit that followed? Was NEWT GINGRICH and his Zombie-like cadre of Right Wing hooligans, who were ACTUALLY RESPONSIBLE for it.

But for the Right? Wilson and Plaime were the VILLIANS. They were the bad guys. NOT the guy that lied. Not their ‘hero.’ The Liberals of today will NEVER be like that. If someone came along with something LEGITIMATE that would take down the Obama white House? (And I don’t mean phony Kenyan Birth Certificates or a picture of him in a turban.) The fact is that the person we’d blame FIRST would Obama himself for doing [whatever it was that was WRONG.] Because the only REAL ‘party of personal responsibility’ in this country, is not even a party: It’s LIBERALS. The Republicans are the party of EVERYONE ELSE taking Responsible.

It makes me sick to hear these lying scumbags talk about “values,” it really does. OTOH, the entrepreneur in me is think of making up some bumper stickers. I figure the Liberals would display them proudly, as a bit of a wink and a nod to each other, but they might be even more popular with idiotic Republicans and Conservatives who lack enough of a sense of Irony to understand the joke.

The first:

It’s O.K. If You’re A Republican!

And the other:

Being Conservative Means Never Having to Admit You’re Wrong

What do you think? You think I could sell those? Would you guys buy either of them?


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Oh yeah, as for the MOVIE…?

It was… OK. Worth seeing, like on Netflix, but really nothing special, story-wise. If there were any distortions or embellishments, I didn’t see any that the made the overall story particularly more interesting than what we already know about, and I didn’t feel that it really revealed or uncovered any territory that isn’t already common knowledge and taken for granted.

It did have several strong points however: Penn’s and Watts’ portrayals of Wilson and Plaime were both very strong performances, particularly Penn’s. (He’s come a long way from Spicolli! LOL) They captured the essences of these two human beings very well, and making them into people you could understand, relate to and sympathize with. The portrayals of Rove and Libby were also very well done, IMHO, and (what might the most amazing feat of all) these two were NOT made out to be scum-sucking demons or anything. Conniving, yes. Machiavellian, for sure. But this came through as little more than an overzealous dedication to the jobs they were doing, lacking only enough scruples to take on an “ends justifies the means” mentality about it. It really didn’t think the movie overtly vilified them. They really each played very minor roles in it, truth be told. Also, surprising, I didn’t find the film to really be overly political, considering the material being shown. Not in a truly PARTISAN / PARTY way anyway.

Really it was about the ideals and principles behind a Free Democracy. Not that it would surprise me that there might be a RW Conservative out there that would take issue with that, but they’d be rather stupid to do so (without irony.) Their objections sound more likes sour grapes to me: The just can’t stand that their guys SUCKED SO BAD, but they’re also so brainwashed that they’d rather be wrong than Liberal. And yes, it was ”biased,” (in much the same way that reality is,) but I defy anyone to show me how this was biased in any absurd or unfair ways. It was biased only from the fact that it was told from Wilson and Plaime’s POV. And really? I really didn’t think it made Wilson out to be any kind of Superhero. He was portrayed with a gruff, abrasive, outspoken personality, and was really a bit of a ball-buster than most people found hard to get along with. Plaime was portrayed as a very competent, professional and passionate Covert operative, who was very good at her job, and was the victim of something horrible being done to her. Is that biased? Perhaps. It is UNREALISTIC? Not based on anything I’ve read that wasn’t written by a RW stooge.

One other thing that was done very poorly – the sound mixing was AWFUL. I don;t usually notice thigns liek this, but in this movies, ti was TERRIBLE.  There were many abrupt transitions between very quiet scenes where people were talking so low that you could barely hear them, and loud thunderous, explosive scenes that scared the crap out of you. (You know: because you had to turn it up so damned loud to hear what was going on in the previous scene!) So watch the volume control, or you’ll rupture an eardrum at some point!

Overall, I would recommend that anyone interested in the Wislon/Plaime story see it, because it’s certainly not a BAD movie. It’s just not a GREAT movie. It’s also more of a personal story and not really meant to be a documentary of what went down.

The Danger of Ideologues -or - “How stupid is the tea party?”

Politics is the art of compromise. And the building of a successful political party depends on building coalitions, some of which may not always “play nice” together. Hence the expression, “Politics makes strange bedfellows.” One example of this, and to their credit, would be the Republicans (since 1980) managing to keep the Libertarians and Evangelical Christian Fundamentalists, two groups with largely mutually exclusive agendas, under the same tent. Of course they did this by appealing to the greed of the libertarians and the stupidity of the Funny-Mentalists: We’ll use gay rights and abortion to get the bible-humpers to vote for us, against their own economic interests, and then you [the rich Libertarians] can keep all the money!

Another example came from a conservative friend of mine. She was a school-teacher, and thus required to join the union. She was horrified to see that some of her union dues were being contributed to various gay and lesbian advocacy groups. She couldn’t understand what the benefit of that would be to her job or the union. So I explained to her: Democrats support unions and the LBGT community supports Democrats. Hence the ‘strange’ alliance. But neither example is at all surprising, since to win the majority vote of over 300 MILLION people, you need more than just one wedge issue or one coalition. The Funny-Mentalists ALONE couldn’t win a pie-eating contect and neither could the Rich Bastards Libertarians. But TOGETHER they’ve managed to become the dominant force fucking up American Politics and subverting the U.S. Constitution for the past 30 years!

And this is why the Tea Party is so stupid: They can only hurt their own cause. They can only help the party that’s LEAST like them, ideologically. And I’ll go out on a limb right now and predict that the more prominent the tea party becomes, the better the Democrats will do in the Mid-Terms and the 2012 election. That’s not to say that they won’t lose any seats. They will. It’s inevitable. But I’ll guarantee you there will several seats (and possibly the Presidency) that the Republicans could have won, but will lose due to the actions of the uber-Right, the RINO-Hunters and the Tea-Baggers.

The most recent example of this was the recent NY-23 race for the House. Democrat Bill Owens won with 73,137 votes. Republican (the incumbent party since the 1850’s) Dede Scozzafava dropped out of the race, but still got 8,582 votes – as a lame duck candidate! “Conservative” Party candidate Doug Hoffman got 69,553. Now… combine the votes for the “Republicans” and the “Conservatives” and you’ve got 78,535 – not only a victory, but a larger margin of victory than Owns had over Hoffman. Now… maybe Scozzafava wouldn’t have gotten EVERY ONE of Hoffman’s votes, but he only would have needed 64,592, about 93% of them, to win. And I don’t think you’d really see much more than 7% of the “Conservative” (meaning ‘clearly to the Right of the Republicans’) vote going to the Democratic candidate!

Another example that hits closer to home with Liberals would be Florida in the 2000 Presidential Election. Ralph Nader (someone generally perceived as more Liberal than Vice President Al Gore) got 97,488 votes in a State that George W. Bush (officially) won by only 537 votes! If Gore gets just 50.3% of the Nader Vote in Florida alone, he wins the state and he’s our 43rd President, Supreme Court be damned.* And considering how few Nader votes would have likely gone to Bush, it’s pretty clear that Gore would have won Florida decisively. And Nader’s political cause was hardly served better by eight years of a George W. Bush presidency!*

But I want to show you one more historic example, just in case you’re still not convinced: The 1912 Presidential Election.

In 1912 the Republican Party was in turmoil, much the way it is now. Although they had a conservative incumbent President in William Howard Taft, the progressive wing, led by former President Theodore Roosevelt was feeling increasingly disenfranchised and broke off, forming the Bull-Moose Party. (Possibly the only Party name stupider than “Tea,” except for maybe the “Know-Nothing” Party - ironically yet another Whig/Republican offshoot! LOL.) As history played out, here’s what the electoral map looked like in 1912:

Democrat Woodrow Wilson won in LANDSLIDE, 435 to 88 to 8.

BUT… Here’s what might have happened, if the Republicans hadn’t imploded that year. Let’s assume they managed to agree on a Taft/Roosevelt or Roosevelt/Taft ticket, and then combine those votes, state by state. Then, just to be fair, and to try and compensate for the fact that not EVERY Roosevelt voter would have been a Taft/Roosevelt voter, we’ll go ahead and give all of Socialist candidate, Eugene Debs’ votes to Woodrow Wilson. Here’s what the map would look like under that scenario:

Woodrow Wilson now LOSES 285 to 246. A close and hard fought campaign, to be sure, but one the Republican clearly had a good shot at winning by any interpretation. But by splitting the vote in so many states, they ended up losing in a landslide. The only state that would have flipped to Wilson was California, which was much less of a factor back then than it is now. Wilson and Roosevelt ran neck and neck, hence the split electoral vote. But Eugene Debs cleaned President Taft’s clock there. So the 174 vote margin (wow!) that Roosevelt won by, becomes a 75,113 vote margin of victory for Wilson, assuming he’s given all of the Debs vote. But that’s the only gain for Wilson. Twenty other states would have move into the Republican’s column, however, and they’d have won.

And, just in case I’ve got you wondering, George H. Bush would have won reelection in 1992 by getting just over 66% of the Perot vote, nationally. In fact, he doesn’t even need that much: Between 52% and 66% of the Perot Vote would have been enough to flip Colorado (59%), Connecticut (65%), Georgia (52%), Iowa (66%), Kentucky (62%), Maine (64%), Montana (55%), Nevada (55%), New Hampshire (53%), New Jersey (58%), Ohio (54%) and Wisconsin (60%) and give George H. Bush a second term, by a margin of 274 to 264 Electoral Votes over Democratic Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. Perot no doubt took some votes away from Clinton as well, but given the numbers involved above, saying that Perot screwed things up for Bush is definitely fair.

Also, to answer your next question, Bob Dole would have needed about 98% of the Perot vote, nationally, to defeat Clinton in 1996; and that’s much more of a stretch. So, I wouldn’t say Perot was a factor in ’96 the way he was in ‘92. But who knows? Maybe Two-Term Vice President Dan Quayle would have been atop the ticket in ’96, if Perot hadn’t botched it up for him four years earlier!

And also, just in case you’re almost as mentally ill as I am wondering: George W. Bush wins reelection against Democrat John Kerry in 2004, even if you award EVERY opposition party’s - thats Nader’s and everyone else’s - votes to Kerry. And some of those votes were for parties to the RIGHT of Bush. So Kerry has absolutely no one to blame but himself.

About the only time a prominent third-party candidate hasn’t screwed things up for the front runner was 1968. In ’68, former Vice President Richard Nixon soundly defeated incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey, despite a strong showing in the South by Segregationist American Independent candidate George Wallace. And remember: For that to happen, not only did the incumbent (Lyndon Johnson) have to decide on his own not to seek reelection, something that had happened only one other time in U.S. history (James Knox Polk was the only other) but the leading candidate within his party ended up getting assassinated just weeks before the Convention! And I’m pretty sure that’s NEVER happened before or since! So that’s two events, one unprecedented and one that had happened only one before in just under 200 years, that had to happen in order to bring about that electoral situation. And that, combined with the national, ideological shifts that started happening in ’68 (which I’ll probable write about next) makes it pretty much impossible to legitimately debate any “what if’s” about the 1968 election.

In any case (in every case) I think the point is clear: The Teabagger Party, the RINO Hunters and all other manner of loud, angry, dangerous and scary right-wingers can only take votes away from the REPUBLICAN candidate. The Democrats will get whatever votes they would have anyway (*assuming Ralph Nader’s learned his fucking lesson!) and what’s left will either go the Republican or get split 2 or more ways. So REST EASY, Liberals! The Tea-Baggers can only attract those who were going to vote against us anyway! And just remember, should things not work out quite the way the Right plans over the next two years: You heard it here first! LOL

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* Just a personal Note: As much as I hate George W. Bush, I truly hate Ralph Nader MORE for delivering the Presidency to him! I hate Ralph Nader so much I can taste in my balls! If I ever meet George Bush on the street, I’ll still probably shake his hand and maybe even ask for an autograph. (After all, as much as I criticize Ronald Reagan, I still have, and cherish, the letter I received from him back when I was seven, in response to the ‘get well’ card I made for him and sent to him after he got shot by John Hinckley.) But if I ever meet Ralph Nader on the street, I’m probably  going to punch him in the face as hard as I can, and as often as any bystanders present will let me! And that’s coming from a guy who’s worked in the field of automotive safety for the past thirteen years! It’s unbelievable how many things got so fucked up just because that uncompromising asshole [Nader] flunked Political Science 101.

Why Republican's need to learn about DARWIN...

I don't know whether I should be fuming or laughing my ass off. Two stories I heard today.

First on NPR this morning...

Apparently the town of DISH, TEXAS (so named so that the residents get free satellite TV, I shit you not) is experiencing health problems. You see, their downwind for a series of about 1200 compressors along a natural gas line that pump the natural gas for the oil shale in one part of the state to refineries in another. These compressors are HUGE and are basically powered by HUGE internal combustion engines - over a thousand of them. And ever since these have been installed, the resident are getting headaches, dizziness, nausea and all kinds of other symptoms, and the dept of evironmental quality have found high level of carcinogens like benzene and other nasty stuff in the air and water. Trees are dying horses and cows (remember: its Texas) are getting sick, going blind, having other problems and either dying or having to be put down...

And you know what? I say, "SCREW 'EM."

FUCKING TEXAS. A state full of global-warming denying oil-men and cowboy-conservatives who poke fun at enviormentalists and scientists and liberals and Democrats. So FUCK 'EM. I hope they all get cancer and die. Then maybe their neighbors might try LISTENING to the scientists and environmentalists when they warn of problems next time instead of mocking them, listening to the oil and gas companies, and their RELIGION, and voting REPUBLICAN so that these companies can poison them with impunity. FUCK 'EM. They get what they deserve. WAIT, NO I TAKE THAT BACK: THEY GET WHAT THEY BEGGED FOR, WHAT THEY CAMPAIGNED FOR, WHAT THEY LOBBIED FOR, AND WHAT THEY VOTED FOR. So SCREW 'EM.

That might sound harsh, but the problem with Darwin is that his forces work way too slowly, and most of these idiots have already bred.

And should I happen to have any liberal friends down in Texas, I offer no apologies. I'm sure if you look around, you'll see that you're basically surrounded by what I'm talking about. I've been to Texas a few times and I been to Massachusetts countless times. And I guaren-god-damn-tee you there are are more Conservatives in Massachusetts than there are Liberals in Texas.

Second, just now on Countdown...

Congressman Joseph "YOU LIE!" Wilson, who voted against giving more money to fund the distribution of the H1N1 Vaccine, is now blaming OBAMA for their not being enough Vaccine to go around. Why the sudden urgency? Apparently his wife contracted H1N1. Good. I hope she dies. He can live with that, and with his vote, and with his party's stupid, vaccant, useless, greedy political philosophy for the rest of his miserable short-ass life. I say short-ass life, because I hope that she gives it to HIM and HE DIES. And then I hope that Obama and the rest of the Dem's have the BALLS to call out everyone (Republican AND Democrat, if there were nay) who voted against that funding and BLAME THEM for these deaths. Their names should go with H1N1 like Bacon and Eggs. Then MAYBE these assholes will grow up and start helping govern the country, instead of obstructing everything in sight only to turn around and hit the campaign trail crying, "See? The Democrats couldn't get anything done! Vote for us instead!"

I hate these bastards! I hate these bastards! I hate these bastards!

(deep breathing)

(more deep breathing)

(slower breathing)

(normal breathing)

Did anyone ever tell you that it's not good to bottle stuff up? To let stuff build up inside you? It's good advice. See... If you do, something like [the above] might happen, and you'll look like a real asshole.

Oh well.

Works for Lewis Black.